The Reluctant Stowaway
This is the very first episode of the series, not counting the previous pilot episode, No Place to Hide. Story The reluctant stowaway It's October 16, 1997 and the United States is proceeding towards the launch of one of history's great adventures: man's colonization of deep space. The Jupiter 2, a futuristic saucer shaped space ship, stands on its launch pad undergoing final preparations. Its mission is to take a single family to a planet of the nearby star Alpha Centauri, which space probes reveal possesses ideal conditions for human life. The Robinson family was selected from among 2 million volunteers for this mission. They will be accompanied by their pilot, US Space Corp Major Donald West, who is trained to fly the ship in the unlikely event that its sophisticated automatic guidance system malfunctions. The Robinsons are the first of millions of families to be sent into space to relieve population pressures on a desperately overcrowded Earth. Other nations are competing with the United States in this effort, and would stoop to anything, even sabotage, to stop it. While technicians, engineers, and scientists in Alpha Control make launch preparations and monitor the Jupiter 2's systems, the Robinsons undergo their pre-flight physical examination. They are pronounced fit for flight by their attending physician, Dr. Zachary Smith. Unknown to the Robinsons, Dr. Smith is an agent of a foreign power, a spy and a saboteur. He has reprogrammed the Jupiter 2's environmental control robot to destroy critical systems aboard the ship eight hours after launch. When the Robinsons arrive at the Jupiter 2, it is swarming with technicians making final preparations for launch. The Robinsons entourage includes General Squires, the director of the colonization project and Dr. Smith. When they enter the ship they are reunited with Major West. After watching a televised farewell message from the President, the Robinsons and Major West enter transparent freezing tubes to be placed in a state of suspended animation for the duration of their five and half year voyage. Dr. Smith realizes that one of the technicians has removed the Robot's power pack, thereby negating his sabotage. He furtively sneaks to the lower deck of the Jupiter, where the robot is stowed, and remains there after the technicians evacuate the ship for launch. Alone at last, Dr. Smith races to reinsert the Robot's power pack and make the proper settings to restore his sabotage. As he rushes to exit the ship, the hatches are automatically sealed for launch and Smith is trapped aboard. A panicked Dr. Smith races back to the lower deck and straps himself to an acceleration couch. As the countdown reaches zero and the Jupiter 2 lifts off, Dr. Smith screams in stark terror. Due to Smith's unanticipated extra weight, the Jupiter's automatic guidance system is compromised, and the ship veers off course into a swarm of meteoroids. As the meteoroids pummel the ship, a fear-stricken Smith revives Major West from suspended animation. West saves the damaged ship by steering it out of the meteor swarm. The Robinsons are revived from suspended animation and John Robinson and Don West attempt to troubleshoot their damaged guidance system. This necessitates deactivating the spaceship's artificial gravity. The delighted children, Will and Penny, do somersaults in weightlessness. Meanwhile, Dr. Smith floats helplessly on the lower deck, his attempt to deactivate the robot thwarted. With gravity restored, Smith crashes to the floor, and the fatal launch plus eight hour mark arrives. Ignoring Dr. Smith's abort command, the robot goes on its pre-programmed rampage. It destroys a control system and sends the Jupiter 2 into hyperspace, traveling faster than the speed of light. Don eventually manages to pull out the robot's power pack before it can destroy the cabin pressurization system. The Robinsons stare out the main view port of their spaceship and John realizes that he can't recognize a single constellation. The Jupiter 2 is lost in space. A spacewalk is needed to repair damaged navigational equipment. Although Don is an experienced space walker, as mission commander John Robinson insists on making the spacewalk himself. He feels that Don's role as pilot is too valuable to risk. A spacewalking rookie, John is a complete klutz. He fires a rocket gun which causes him to collide with the Jupiter, and he loses tools. Eventually his tether breaks and he floats away. Is John Robinson doomed to drift forever in space as his oxygen supply dwindles? Tune in next week, same time same station.... Some notes on scientific accuracy There's no denying that the Jupiter 2 looks cool. It was one of the most expensive television props of its time. Nevertheless, it is not a plausible interstellar spaceship according to physics as we currently understand it. The Jupiter is said to be capable of reaching Alpha Centauri in just five and a half years. Alpha Centauri lies at a distance of 4.3 light years from Earth. This means that the ship must be capable of traveling at at least 80% of the velocity of light. In reality, it would need to accelerate for a very long time to build up to such speeds. The acceleration would need to be limited to rates that wouldn't crush the crew. To compensate, its peak velocity would need to be even higher than 80% light speed to read Alpha Centauri in the allotted time. Theoretically, the most efficient of all possible rocket fuels is antimatter. Upon contact with ordinary matter, antimatter and an equal quantity of matter are annihilated into pure energy in accordance with Einstein's famous equation E=mc^2. Even if powered by matter/antimatter annihilation, a ship capable of traveling near light speed would need to consist mostly of giant tanks full of fuel, just as present day rockets do. Instead, the interior of the Jupiter 2 consists entirely of living compartments with no apparent room for fuel at all. This is impossible under physics as we know it. We might imagine that the twirling light thing at the base of the Jupiter 2 uses currently unknown physics to do the trick. Instead the narration tells us that the Jupiter is powered by 'great atomic motors'. Unfortunately, even nuclear fusion is much too feeble to accelerate a spaceship to much beyond about 10% of light speed. The year 1997 has come and gone and starships are still a hope of the distant future because of the incredible speeds and energies they would need. After launch, the Jupiter 2 apparently acquires some additional capabilities that are simply inexplicable. When the robot destroys a component of the astrogator, the Jupiter somehow acquires the ability to travel in hyperspace, faster than the speed of light. In one bit of dialog, an Alpha Control official tells the president by phone that the spaceship has "passed the limits of our galaxy". The distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri is trivial by comparison with the vast scale of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The galaxy is a disk shaped system of several hundred billion stars, surrounded by a sparser, roughtly spherical halo of star clusters. The disk is 100,000 light years in diameter and about 1000 light years in thickness. The sun is near the center of the thickness of the galactic disk, and thus the shortest distance to leave the galactic disk is about 500 light years. If the Jupiter 2 took five and a half years to reach Alpha Centauri, it would take more than 600 years to travel this far. If it did, it would be a long time before anybody in Alpha Control knew about it, because tracking data from the ship, traveling at the speed of light, would take 500 years to reach Earth. Leaving the galactic disk wouldn't really constitute passing beyond the limits of the galaxy, because the halo of star clusters surrounding the disk is 200,000 light years in diameter. Perhaps what the script writer actually meant to say is that the Jupiter had passed beyond the limits of our solar system. There is another sense in which the writers of this episode have little appreciation of the incredible velocities involved in space travel. When the Jupiter 2 veers off course, it encounters a swarm of meteoroids which are portrayed as giant slow moving boulders pummeling the ship. In fact, any such encounter would take place at very high relative speeds of many miles per second. An impact with such a boulder, even at a small fraction of the velocity of light, would surely vaporize the Jupiter 2. In reality, most meteoroids are actually closer in size to dust grains than boulders, but would still pose a threat to a spaceship moving at the speeds needed to reach the stars. This episode first aired in 1965, the year of the first US spacewalk by Edward White from the Gemini 4 spacecraft. Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov had become the world's first space walker months earlier. Spacewalking was new, glamorous, and dangerous. Thus the appeal of John Robinson's spacewalk, portrayed with special effects that were spectacular for the time. In reality, Robinson's broken tether problem has a fairly simple solution. Space shuttle astronauts are trained to maneuver the shuttle to scoop up a spacewalker cast adrift by such an accident into the shuttle's cargo bay. Thus, Don could simply have maneuvered the Jupiter 2 within John's reach. No rocket gun or spacewalk by Maureen would have been necessary. The International Space Station can't maneuver easily like the Shuttle, so spacewalkers carry a small emergency maneuvering pack for use if their tether breaks. Although real space travel in the early twenty first century doesn't include starships, there are nevertheless some ways in which we have progressed beyond Lost in Space. Spacewalking is now relatively safe and routine. Astronauts have completed thousands of hours outside their craft without a single fatality. Today, a real life John Robinson could have felt confident about Don's safety if he had sent him outside. Next Episode: The Derelict Category:Episodes Category:Episodes in Season One